Thursday, April 25, 2013

Post-Christian America and the Big Bang Theory

“The Big Bang Theory” is a highly popular tv sitcom focusing on the love and social lives of young Caltech scientists and their glowingly attractive next-door neighbor, part-time actress and Cheesecake Factory waitress Penny. Now nearing the end of its sixth season, the show would appear to garner its popularity from its depiction of the resolute nerdiness of its brilliant theoretical physicist and engineer characters and their helplessness before the earthy Penny. Their personal lives are shallow at best, obsessed with comic book heroes and Star Trek characters.[i]

The show toys with science with some seriousness. The Spock-like main character around whom the action revolves is Sheldon Cooper (named after physicist Leon Cooper). His roommate Leonard Hofstadter bears the name of the 1961 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Robert Hofstadter, and his son Douglas, whose Goedel, Escher, Bach won him the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Even more striking, Sheldon’s neuroscientist girlfriend (“who is not a girlfriend”) is played by a child actress who went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience and then returned to acting. A UCLA scientist checks all references to science for accuracy. The sitcom’s theme song performed by the rock group Barenaked Ladies, was commissioned by the producers. Its compact lyrics relate the birth of the universe from the steady expansion of a “big bang” and the subsequent evolution of the human species.[ii]

Hat tip to Anglican Curmudgeon who writes, "This piece, by Ken Masugi, on the popular TV show "The Big Bang Theory," at The Library of Law and Liberty, goes far to explain why our post-modern/modernist culture (it doesn't matter what term you apply to it) has nothing to offer for mankind but the fragile and built-in frailties of man himself. Please do take the time to read it in its entirety, even if you are not a regular of The Big Bang Theory, because it tells you all you need to know about the self-imposed inadequacies of science, per se, either to explain or to accommodate the primary aspects of our God-given reality."